Christensen Clayton focused on ‘jobs to done’, with customers ‘hiring’ your product or service to solve a problem of theirs.

 

Building on his work, it is useful to also frame your thinking in how you can helping your customers solve the problems before and after your product (service or innovation), in order to help turn your minimum viable product into a minimum viable solution.  In order to do this effectively, you need laser like focus on behaviour(s) of your customers.

 

The following three examples illustrate the importance of leading with behaviour 'change', as part of the innovation canvas. 

 

1) The UK government offered significant subsidies to encourage households to get their lofts insulated, to reduce energy loss and therefore consumption. Even when it was practically free, with significant ongoing savings, it should be a no-brainer that households should take up this offer. However, the uptake was very low. The government's behavioural science unit, focused on designing ‘nudges’ that result in desired behaviour changes, sent observers to households without insulation. What they discovered is the biggest barrier to adoption, was the mess that was often in peoples loft. They didn’t want to go through the hassle of sorting the mess out, and arranging the car trips to the local depots to throw stuff away. When the government then partnered with a DIY store, offering households help in clearing up their loft for a fee, update of the subsidy increased five fold.

 

2)  thinkLaw was selling critical thinking workbooks for teachers, having generated $16K in the first 4 months of operation. The problem for school leaders, was that even with a supposedly simple and easy way to teach critical thinking in lessons, teachers still struggled in it's adoption, especially in the context of 30 students in a class. School leaders didn't have the time to coach their teachers in this much needed skill. After thinkLaw integrated and framed their solution as a teacher training around critical thinking (plus workbooks to make it happen) they closed nearly $65K in 8 weeks, and built a pipeline of $500K.

 

3) With JobCanvas, we thought we were onto a sure success, by helping to turn boring text based job-specs into visual and interactive experiences for candidates. Without the deluge of HR customers lining our doors, we knew something more fundamental was wrong, not just that it needed yet more features.  When we interviewed recruiters, the key interface to hiring managers, we recognised a pattern in their responses - "hiring managers don't give us the time of the day to help write effective job-specs". Digging further into this perceived 'time problem', we spoke to and observed  8 hiring managers, we realised that they see the job-spec as an operational task, relying on edit copy and paste' from existing job specs, feel that they are writing job-specs for recruiters and not candidates, and feel that it's recruiters job to write the job-specs.

By observing hiring managers, we realised they do their most strategic thinking about new roles when submitting annual budgets, so we developed a tool called the 'hiring canvas' (the bit before the job canvas) to help hiring managers build better business case for their new hires.

The hiring canvas then made the recruiters life easier by giving them context of the role, allowing them to create the first draft of the job-spec, thus saving hiring managers time.